I visited Jim today to give Cassy a pre-MoT once over, and to tackle the rust wound by the N/S wheel arch.
With her back up on axle stands and the rear wheels off, Jim confirmed that the callipers were straight, the discs were good but the pads were down to a few mm.
I had spare pads with me so fitted them and we bled the brakes, Jim this time managing to drop and smash the jar he uses to catch LHM in rather than me making a mess all over his drive
With the MoT checks done, the only area of concern was the rust patch I mentioned. It's in the usual place, but was made worse several years ago where I had to swerve in MK while leaving a parking bay due to an idiot speeding around the corner, and I clipped a low concrete flower bed which split the bottom edge of the seam allowing a rust patch to eat its way through. The leading edge had already been patched at a previous MoT, and this was showing quite a bit of surface rust through the paint they'd applied.
Jim did a good job of straightening the dent on the actual wheel arch.
I fitted a wire brush disc to my electric drill and had sooooo much fun buzzing off the old paint and rust! Jim had a go too and I think he'll agree it's a great stress reliever!
The cleaned area was dosed liberally with Hammerite rust be gone type stuff (phosphoric acid) making sure to get as much as possible up inside the hole between the inner and outer skins.
I used some of Jim's spare foam sheeting to fill the cavity a bit so filler wouldn't just vanish inside, and then made up my first batch (Jim informs me it stinks!).
Building up from the edges, and making 3 batches of filler, I built it up to cover the holes in a smooth-ish manner.
Somehow when I adjusted my seat doing the MoT checks, the foam base had popped up at the front of the seat.
Jim took it out while I was doing the filler, and took at look at what had happened.
The foam and seat cloth is held on by a cord running around the threaded edge of the cloth, then pulled tight and tied. This had snapped.
Getting his sewing kit out (ie a fishing hook), Jim managed to rethread the cloth and pull it tight, using cable ties in some sections where feeding the cord through the threading wasn't possible. Practically good as new it is.
By the time we'd gotten the seat back in, the filler had set and I got to work with some sand paper.
If I hadn't been so cold, tired and ill, I'd have done a better job, but it's smooth, just undulates slightly in places.
With the wind picking up, we discounted the spray primer I had (not wanting to risk getting any on Jim's XM or his neighbour's Poxhalls) so used some anti-rust Hammerite so now Cassy has a battleship grey section, but should be protected from the rust for a while.
I'll see if I can pop to Halfords before the MoT on Thursday and get some proper paint made up, then at some point in the future I'll take an angle grinder to the messy ridges of the original patch, and if Jim's got his mig by then, have him do the job properly
